This weblog is to discuss your software, hardware and other PC issues.

Menu

It has support for: mp3, mp4, mp2, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and others. There are many features that make adding or changing tags in your audio files very easy. It can query the CDDB and compare track length to your files to identify music that you are unsure of the artist or album. If you have artist and album info in the filename, it can parse that info into tag entries. EasyTag is also able to change the filenames and directory structure of your collection with user-specified tag info. This will allow you to take a large group of assorted files that have artist and album information and relocate them to a more organized directory structure. The program uses the GTK+ interface, which provides for a simple and pleasant environment for working with your files. The browsing window lets you choose between a directory structure view, or an artist/album view. The tag entry editing window is clearly laid out and provides for many different fields, including album art. There are several shortcut buttons that allow you to quickly access commonly used features. EasyTag makes the task of keeping your music collection properly tagged and organized a simple process.

Apple’s Mail.app is the IMAP/POP email application included with every Mac.

This application is a simple to use and easy to set up alternative to less functional web interfaces and more complicated email applications such as Thunderbird or Entourage. On the whole I would give Mail.app a very positive review. The newest version, included in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, adds some great new features. Automatic setup means that if you use a popular service like Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo, all you need to set it up is a username and password. Another excellent feature is basic RSS feed aggregation. It is a very simple implementation, less powerful than apps like NetNewsWire, but it is dead simple to use. The only negatives to Mail.app are these two things: it only runs on Mac and it’s shutdown behavior is not standard. What this means is that if Mail.app is busy (for example, trying to talk to a server that isn’t responding) it may block you from logging off or shutting down, requiring you to wait or force-quit the app. Despite this shortcoming, I fully recommend Mail.app to any Mac user looking to make the transition from web-based email clients.

Recolored Have you ever came across a black and white photo that you would like to add new life to?

This $29 software that I stumbled upon called Recolored does just that. The 30-day free trial is suitable for small personal projects if you’ll only be colorizing a single photograph or two. At $29 for a licensed copy, I think this application is a steal. Some folks take their photos to professionals who use similar software and charge hundreds of dollars to recolor photos. You could probably even run your own small business with this software. All you have to do is choose a few colors from a color palette, and put a few strokes around the edges that you to be that specific color. When you press the colorize button the image is colorized. Try it out!

Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) is an application that implements seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, and which provides a number of features that good old Microsoft doesn’t yet provide as standard.

The first and foremost of these is the search facility. NEO automatically catalogs your emails in an instantly searchable format, which means that you no longer have to wait while Outlook trawls through your emails trying to find what you are after. For example – you remember that you talked to ‘Terry’ a while back, and want to go back over what was said. Just type in the words “terry share options”, and you will see any emails containing those words virtually instantly. As another example – you remember that you talked to ‘Terry’ about share options, but can’t remember the exact keywords. Just click on the ‘Correspondent’ tab, and then click on Terry’s name. You’ll then be presented with any emails sent from, to, or copied to Terry, in one list. It’s hard to overstate how useful this program can be when you’ve got a bulging mail box.

Overclocking is modding a computer to perform at faster clock cycles than it was designed for by the manufacturer.

It involves pushing a computer to its limits and perhaps, even beyond those limits to achieve faster and powerful performance from the computer. While it may seem like rocket science to many, overclocking, when stripped down to the basics is really about 3 fundamental things; temperature, lifespan and uncertainty. Temperature governs speed – the hotter the chips get, the slower they perform, and this is where cooling systems such as liquid nitrogen injection systems come in to play. Overclocking must also take into account the effect on the lifespan of the components. Simply put, stock parts in a processor were not built to withstand such powerful overclocked output and are therefore more prone to “catastrophic failure” (complete and irreversible) during overclocking. Lastly, with overclocking comes uncertainty or the lack of definitive ways of measuring performance of the overclocked computer. This can be made easier with standard operations to test the workload capabilities of the system.

REAP is a software program that lets you evaluate the merits of a residential real estate investment.

It is offered on the Dolf de Roos website. Dolf is a real estate investor and educator with a multi-country portfolio. The software is designed to work smoothly even if the investment is not US based. You set the parameters for the local market (taxes, normal buying or selling costs, type of mortgages available plus other variables). The parameters are saved as a profile for the country or region. When you enter the information for a specific property you select the country or region that applies and the parameters are applied. The software produces seven pages of output per property. Pictures, graphs and tabular information is output. You can then approach lenders, prospective investment partners or buyers with your deal information. I have used the reports to find investors for my real estate deals. The package runs on PC running windows.